#askgaryvee Offers Tepid Hot-Takes On Business, Industry, and Social Media
Vaynerchuk also wants you to know his opinions on social media, marketing on social media, and investing in social media. This makes sense, given his history of producing a wine-tasting Youtube show in 2006 and later investing in Twitter, Facebook, and Uber. He also answers questions (submitted by fans) about himself, as he has become an influencer in his sphere of tech giants, digital media geniuses, and relentless self-promoters.
Vaynerchuk isn’t shy about promoting himself in his book, regularly talking about his podcast, previous books he’s written, and selective parts of his own history as a fledgling entrepreneur. What he shares with the reader most is his energy, which comes through even in written form: he is adamant that to get to where you want to be, you have to hustle and grind.
The first third of #askygaryvee offers the most valuable advice (have a good philosophy to guide your work ethic, luck plays a part in business success but so does confidence) and a good dose of believe-in-yourself-ism that Vaynerchuk, a man brimming with self-confidence, values a lot. He believes in you to the exact degree to which you believe in yourself. Also helpful is the advice he gives re: social media marketing. The answers aren’t always surprising, but they are practical.
But the rest is an intermittently interesting tangle of Vaynerchuk’s likes and dislikes, mentions of the New York Jets, and references to social media sites that no longer exist (fare thee well, Meerkat, Vine, and Periscope). And this is where my expectations for the book really took a nosedive. So much of his advice in earlier chapters was theoretical that I assumed he’d give more concrete examples as the book went on. How wrong I was.
There are several missed opportunities for him to reflect on his experience working in his father’s liquor store and transitioning to ownership of said store. How did he navigate that, and what additional responsibilities did he have to adjust to? How did he take a family business worth $3 million dollars and grow its worth to $60 million by the time he left? Other than a rare humanizing example of a costly marketing blunder he made, he leaves this part of his resume blank.
It was around this point that I began to reassess who “Gary Vee” is and how he portrays himself and suddenly, some of his advice sounded empty. His “jab, jab, right hook” technique is a combination of the soft sell and hard sell approaches. His suggestion that a teen entrepreneur should try selling rocks to kids is nonsensical (how a kid is supposed to be dazzled by a rock when she’s got her own tablet is not addressed). A really big oversight is when he tries to hold up Justin Bieber’s promotion of Carly Rae Jepsen’s 2015 single “Call Me Maybe” as a successful example of marketing. This is technically true, but Vaynerchuk omits the crucial detail that Bieber and Jepsen had the same manager, which you’d assume would heavily influence Bieber’s tweeting about the song in the first place.
The more critical I became of Vaynerchuk’s spin and his work philosophy, the quicker his “grind to get ahead” image fell apart. Though he argues that working and hustling through your twenties—to the point of shutting out every other aspect of one’s life—is the best guarantee of success, he claims that the first tenant of his philosophy is “family first.” He mentions having a trainer and praises his wife for introducing him to healthy foods, but his definition of hustling leaves no time for anyone to attend to their physical, let alone mental health. And it’s easy to claim to put family first when your first employer was your father and your first business partner was your brother.
Most telling is his answer to a question about the lack of office chairs at Vaynermedia and whether it was done on purpose to “instill the hustle [culture]” in his employees. “No, but I wish I had thought of it,” he replies, as it would have driven competition. How the number of chairs influences competitive tendencies goes unanswered (unless he believes that desk chair envy inspires quality work). Even worse, it just makes him look like a cheap boss. This comes from the same book where he has a whole chapter on how important self-awareness is in an employer.
In the end, the emptiness in Vaynerchuk’s persona echoes my lack of interest in what he has to offer. I went into this book hoping to come out of it informed, entertained, and curious to learn more about navigating a start-up. What I got was an unexpected character study of a privileged entrepreneur who doesn’t understand that what he doesn’t say about himself speaks volumes.
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